Michael Hayward on his surreal experience of watching "Contagion" during lockdown.
Kate Helmore
Escaping Orthodoxy
Kate Helmore on the stark contrast between skinny jeans and ankle-length skirts in the Netflix series "Unorthodox".
Michael Hayward
Baudelaire Through the Looking Glass
Michael Hayward on "The Baudelaire Fractal" by Lisa Robertson.
Shyla Seller
Reel Love
Shyla Seller on "The Forbidden Reel"—a documentary on the legacy and preservation of Afghan Films.
Stephen Osborne
The Future Is Uncertain Country
As men of high seriousness appear on television with their crystal balls, Stephen Osborne shares what he learned about the future from Ray the astrologer.
roni-simunovic
Flight of Fancy
Roni Simunovic takes an Air Canada rouge flight from Halifax to Calgary and ridicules the flight attendants' absurd new uniforms.
Phoebe Tsang
Be Careful What You Wish For
A tarot card reading for John Franklin, Arctic explorer and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, by Phoebe Tsang.
David Mitchell
Imaginary City
Crack addicts, art critics and pregnant waitresses populate David Mitchell's uncanny vision of Vancouver.
Stephen Osborne
Snows of Yesteryear
A blizzard hits two days before Christmas, stirring up feelings of trepidation and excitement for the passengers of a bus.
Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far
On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.
Michael Hayward
Into the Heart of the Landscape
Michael Hayward on the recursive nature of reading and writing inspiration.
Barry Kirsh
Soulmates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships
Barry Kirsch on the juices and nutriments of imagination.
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Broken Hearted
Kelsea O'Connor on two comic-obsessed teens in rural Nova Scotia.
Thad McIlroy
Trial by Water
Ebb and flow in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Paul DeLorme
Escapist
A Canadian soldier captured at Dieppe in 1942 tells what happened next.
JILL MANDRAKE
Unity, Order and Equilibrium
Jill Mandrake on the beauty of crafted visual poetry.
Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor
A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.
Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski
He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?
Sewid-Smith Daisy
Three Stories About Moving
The worst time for your pet to run away is when you are moving, and my family moved a lot.
Anson Ching
Zen in Ecotopia
Anson Ching on letting the facts form your privilege.
Patty Osborne
A Korean Friend
Patty Osborne on a North Korean novel from North Korea.
George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse
The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.
Thad McIlroy
Hernia Heaven
Thad McIlroy spends the night in hospital to get a hernia—possibly on his left side, possibly on his right—repaired.
Ivan Coyote
Gender Failure
It didn’t feel like there was any possible way this could really be happening—nineteen years of binding my breasts, even more years trying not to hate them.
The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,
the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown
Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character
I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.
Mia + Eric
Future Perfect
New bylaws for civic spaces.
JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound
It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.
SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm
Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.
Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers
It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.
Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away
Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.
DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps
On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.
Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café
It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.
Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect
I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.
MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal
The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.
Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher
Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."
BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late
"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."
Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans
I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.
Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life
Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.
Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary
After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.
Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor
A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.
Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski
He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?
Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House
A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.
Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?
Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.
David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies
Mastery of the self
CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies
"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."
Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs
Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part
Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw
Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.
In the Rock Clock app, you can set your own wake-up time or choose the Rock Time option, which wakes you up whenever Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is waking up, usually between four and six in the morning. There is no snooze option.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Home and Heart
Mary Schendlinger sees The Babushkas of Chernobyl, Inaate/se and A Good American at the DOXA Festival.
Michael Hayward
The Library of Roguery
Jim Christy and the editors who worked on Rogues, Rascals, and Scalawags Too should be congratulated for their uncanny ability to squeeze every last euphemism out of their thesauri.
Thad McIlroy
Conditionally Paris
Thad McIlroy reviews Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano, a Nobel Prize-winning author.
Stephen Osborne
Frozen, Not Forgotten
"The miscellanist Rob Kovitz in his new book Dead and Cold has assembled, coordinated or otherwise summoned into being the best, the most spellbinding and the most chilblain-inducing account of death in the Arctic that you will ever read."
Kris Rothstein
Elixirs
Craft Distilling: Making Liquor Legally at Home by Victoria Redhed Miller is a no-nonsense how-to book, and a rational plea to lift laws that prevent small-batch not-for-profit distilling.
Norbert Ruebsaat
Golden Voice
Leonard Cohen pays a visit to the neighborhood in song.
Lily Gontard
Passage
Lily Gontard reviews Passage (2008), directed by John Walker.
Rebekah Chotem
Coming of Age Near Thunder Bay
Rebekah Chotem reviews Sleeping Giant, a critically-acclaimed coming-of-age film directed by Andrew Cividino.
Michael Hayward
Cycling in Cities
"To properly understand Mayor Gregor Robertson’s ongoing bicyclification of Vancouver, I think we need more books like Jon Day’s Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, an extended essay about 'the bicycle in the cultural imagination.'"
KELSEA O'CONNOR
Martel’s Mountains
In The High Mountains of Portugal (Knopf), Yann Martel returns to magic realism in three interwoven stories about lost love and journeys taken to reclaim the past.
roni-simunovic
Teledildonics
"Sex for Dummies, the 'Fun and Easy Way to Have Great Sex in the ’90s,' sat in the window of my neighbourhood bookstore and I bought it because, as a twenty-three-year-old, I was curious about what sex was like before my time."
Michael Hayward
Following Wind, Following Water
Michael Hayward reviews a number of travelogues by Daniel Canty and Bill Porter.
RICHARD VAN CAMP
Time-Tested
Mary Schendlinger reviews M Train by Patti Smith and My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem.
Rebekah Chotem
American Doppelgänger
"It’s well documented that Hollywood films use Canada to stand in for the US, including Brokeback Mountain, Good Will Hunting, the Twilight series, Rambo’s First Blood and many, many more blockbusters."
Annabel Lyon
The Life You Can Save
Hint: It’s not your own.
Norbert Ruebsaat
A History of Reading
Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading taught me to read.
Michael Hayward
The Muskwa Assemblage
"Poetry is the most personal of the literary arts; laureates notwithstanding, few poets enjoy national stature nowadays, and fewer still are known beyond the boundaries of their native land."
Patty Osborne
A Cockney in China
At the age of 30, Gladys Aylward, a housemaid, bought a ticket from London, England, to Yangcheng, Shanxi Province, China, in order to work as a missionary.
Michał Kozłowski
Poets on Film
The Western Front, Canada’s longest running artist-run centre, recently hosted a public screening of two dozen or so films from their archive of readings by poets from the 1970s, 80s and 90s.
Patty Osborne
The Mere Future
Meet the new bosses of a futuristic New York. Same as the old boss?
Rebekah Chotem
Room for the Real
Rebekah Chotem reviews the film adaptation of Room by Emma Donoghue.
Stephen Osborne
National Poetry Daze
CBC Radio celebrated National Poetry Day by reading a poem written in 1916 by Bliss Carman, which raises the question: are there no living poets who cut the mustard?
Michael Hayward
Coastal Memories
Michael Hayward reviews Everything Rustles by Jane Silcott and Born Out of This by Christine Lowther.
Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.
Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage
When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.
Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions
Coming to harbour in a new world.
Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters
Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.
CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero
In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.
Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races
Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.
Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise
“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.
Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO
For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.
LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety
Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.
Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots
"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."
Stephen Henighan
Not Reading
What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.
Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking
Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.
Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions
Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.
Stephen Henighan
Plague
What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague
Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader
Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.
Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman
The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.
Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far
On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.
George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse
The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.
Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales
A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.
Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time
What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.
Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy
Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.
Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality
Must artists declare their moral integrity?
Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame
Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.
Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes
There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.
"Campbell River, best fishing in the world. They do everything for you. All you have to do is bring yourself and decide what you're going to drink."
Miriam Toews
Sweet Badass Dude
A nervous kid from Canada becomes the king of the basketball courts in Venice Beach.
Stephen Osborne
The Lost Art of Waving
Before people 'poked' and 'tweeted', waving was how we said hello and goodbye to each other.
Ann Diamond
How I (Finally) Met Leonard Cohen
On a rainy night in October 1970, I crossed paths with Canada's most elusive poet.
Stephen Osborne
Shots Fired
A new dispatch from Geist's 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition."How did more shots fired represent what we miss in life, in city life?"
Daniel Francis
Writing the Nation
Reconsidering the faintly embarrassing Pierre Berton.
MARY MEIGS
Off- and On-Camera
Out on the set, except for the fact that there is always someone to catch us if we stumble, or someone to set up folding chairs for us between scenes, we are beneficiaries of the semi that denies the passing of clock-time. There is nothing to remind
Michael Hayward
Literary Lives
Diana Athill never dreamed of writing—until one morning, suddenly she wrote. "Until that moment I had been hand-maiden, as editor, to other people’s writing, without ever dreaming of myself as a writer."
Stephen Henighan
Chariots of China
A bibliophile's worst nightmare: being stuck on a plane with a terrible book. A book mistaken for a work of serious history.
Stephen Osborne
Chiquita Canáda
Last month we had a visit from Elizabeth Anderson, who hails from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she is a graduate student at the state university. Her field of study is Canada, and she also writes about Canada for Utne Reader.
MARY MEIGS
Being in the Company of Strangers
Our film is a semi-documentary. We are ourselves, up to a point; beyond this point is the "semi," a region with boundaries that become more or less imprecise, according to our view of them. In one sense, it is semi from beginning to end, for we would
Patty Osborne
Beyond Recall
Patty Osborne reviews a collection of journal entries, correspondence and other writings produced by Mary Meigs during the last years of her life.
J. Jill Robinson
One Night at the Oceanview
Did that really happen? J. Jill Robinson initiates a midnight stand-off between the police and two drunk brothers in an RV Park in White Rock, B.C.
Life in Language
For four decades, Jay Powell and Vickie Jensen helped to revive forgotten languages for many Aboriginal groups along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Read their story here.
Daniel Francis
Red Scare
The Bolshevists are coming! The Bolshevists are coming! Daniel Francis recounts Canada's close call with a revolution.
Stephen Henighan
Divergence
Stephen Henighan argues that audiences used to have different opinions on the news; now they cannot even agree on the terms of debate.
Myrl Coulter
Room Ten
Was that a ghost?Why don't you have room service?We used up all your Kleenex. Sorry.Read more entries from a guest book found in room ten of a hotel in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.
Daniel Collins
Phallic Blessing
In Drukpa Kunley's monastery in Bhutan, Daniel Collins experiences a birthday blessing among phallic iconography.
Alberto Manguel
Metamorphoses
Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.
Stephen Osborne
Banker Poet
Stephen Osborne recollects his encounter last summer with Robert Service outside a cafe in Vancouver. Service, who wrote the poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee," died in 1958.
Stephen Henighan
Third World Canada
Stephen Henighan compares the chaotic sprawl of "Third World" societies to the degradation of Canada's political, social and physical landscape.
Stephen Osborne
Life on Masterpiece Avenue
Stephen Osborne memorializes D.M. Fraser, a tiny ancient man at the age of twenty-six, who wrote sentences that made you want to take him (and them) home with you.
Michael Turner
Making Stuff Up
Author Michael Turner riffs on D.M. Fraser's short fiction Class Warfare, one of the ten classic Vancouver books reissued for Vancouver's 125th birthday.
Thad McIlroy
Death and the Economist
The art of the obituary lives on: Obituaries of note from The Economist magazine, including those of the "gunrunner of CIA front companies" and "last interesting Marxist."
Daniel Francis
Double Life
The poet John Glassco lived in disguise, masquerading as a member of the gentry while writing pornography and reinventing his past.